Promoting the benefits of VMware's virtualization products, Great Lakes Computer, a 24 year old billion dollar reseller of HP & VMware products, announced that it will offer a free VMware Essentials license with the purchase of most HP ProLiant DL380G6 server models.

Having a list price of $995, VMware’s Essentials edition is VMware’s entry level virtualization product and is well suited for test environments, small to medium businesses and for companies just starting to consider virtualization. Upgrades to VMware Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise licenses are available.

The DL380G6 server is optimized to run virtual machines with 2 quad core Intel E5520 CPUs, 24GB of memory, redundant power and a pair of 146GB SAS drives. Custom configurations and different server models are available that still qualify for this promotion. When factoring in the price for the hardware, the combined package price is being offered at discounts usually reserved for only the largest HP enterprise customers.

With VMware’s virtualization product you can:

Reduce server capital costs by over 50%

Cut the deployment time of new servers from weeks to hours

Centrally monitor and control servers and virtual machines from a single pane of glass

Automate operations to improve IT responsiveness

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials edition includes:

VMware ESX/ESXi licenses for up to three dual socket hosts

VMFS (Virtual Machine File System)

4-way Virtual SMP

VMware vCenter Server Agent

VMware vStorage APIs / VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)

VMware Update Manager

VMware vCenter Server for Essentials

When asked what was behind the promotion, the VMware Brand Manager for Great Lakes Computer was quoted as saying; "vSphere Essentials comes with full blown ESX server licenses for up to three physical servers, so we're not talking about a bare-bones promotion here. As an Enterprise level VMware partner with on staff VCPs, we want to promote our ability to help customers realize all the benefits that come through virtualization. By combining our aggressive HP server pricing with what amounts to free VMware, what better way is there to get some visibility than by offering what is, in our opinion, simply the best VMware and HP server package in the market?"

This unique promotion, only available through Great Lakes Computer, expires June 15th. To learn more about the promotion visit Great Lakes Computer Source on the web or by calling 1-800-488-2587.